The Game's Afoot!

I slept in this morning after my long day yesterday. After I finally had breakfast, I watched most of The Great Mouse Detective while reorganizing the videos and the DVDs. I realized that I now have more DVDs than videos, so the DVDs were moved to the video rack and vice versa.

The Great Mouse Detective was made in 1986, at a time when Disney was just beginning to recover from the cutbacks and limited animation of the 70s. It's not their best film ever, but it's fun and very different. It's based after a popular series of kids' books (which I have read). Basil of Baker Street is the title character, a mouse Sherlock Holmes living in Victorian England, right under Baker Street. When kindly Dr. Dawson brings little lost Olivia Flaversham into his home, she reveals a case that leads right to his adversary Professor Rattigan...and a fiendish plot to take over England!

I have a soft spot for Mouse Detective. It's one of two Disney movies released in the 80s that I saw in the theaters as a child. (The other was the movie that came out before this one, the much-maligned The Black Cauldron.) Vincent Price said that his voice role as Professor Rattigan was one of his favorites, and it shows. He sounds like he's having the time of his life. There's some nice animation, too, notably some of the first use of CGI in a 2-D cartoon during the finale in Big Ben.

Work wasn't nearly as exciting. It was on and off all day, with no major problems other than some mildly demanding old ladies. I had no relief, but the rush hour crowd had slowed somewhat by 5, which allowed me to get off on-time.

It was a really nice day, sunny and warm. I changed into shorts when I got home, then rearranged the cassettes and CDs. I cleared enough cassettes out of the cassette shelves to make room for the Christmas and kids' cassettes. The Christmas CDs now share their crate with the last of the soundtrack CDs until I can get a second crate for them.

Watched the new Sherlock Holmes during dinner. I absolutely adored it. Picture a far more historically accurate and interesting League of Extrordinary Gentlemen, Indiana Jones gone steampunk, or Young Sherlock Holmes with adult characters, and you get the idea. This time, a very human Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) finds himself contending with his best friend Dr. Watson (Jude Law) getting married and moving out and the return of former girlfriend Irene Adler...just as the dead man from his last case, who had been killing young ladies via a cult, suddenly reappears...

Other than I wasn't that crazy about the occult plot, I had a LOT of fun with this one. Law and Downey were hysterical. No wonder Holmes doesn't want his buddy leaving the roost - they already fight like old marrieds. The open-ended finale was pretty intriguing, too...